Saturday, July 29, 2017

Wild Kingdom - Bringing Back Britain's Wildlife ~ Stephen Moss

Time is galloping on because this Thursday sees the announcement of the winner of the 2017 Wainwright Prize. Just to recap this is a prize of £5000 awarded to the author of the book that, in the judges' opinion,best reflects Wainwright’s core values of Great British writing & culture and a celebration of the outdoors.

And for those who might be asking 'Who on earth is Wainwright?'

'Born in Blackburn in 1907, Alfred Wainwright left school at the age of 13. A holiday at the age of 23 kindled a life-long love affair with the Lake District. Following a move to Kendal in 1941 he began to devote every spare moment he had to researching and compiling the original seven Pictorial Guides. He described these as his ‘love letters’ to the Lakeland Fells.'

If I was a Lake District walker (which I haven't been yet) I would have all of these on my shelf and would use them constantly. As it is I walk out on Dartmoor every week and bemoan the fact that Dartmoor really has no latter-day pocket-sized, rainproof equivalent. William Crossing did a thorough job in the early twentieth century, and Eric Hemery an even more thorough job in the 1980s, and though both books are fascinating for their detail and description they lack Wainwright's detailed drawings, and neither book is portable.

Criteria for the Wainwright Prize suggest that the book should be narrative driven with a subject that must be related to nature, the outdoors or travel writing (not guidebooks) covering Great Britain and Wild Kingdom - Bringing Back Britain's Wildlife by Stephen Moss (with another fine Carry Ackroyd jacket design) fits the bill well. As a TV producer (most notably in the BBC Natural History department and bringing us Springwatch) he is well-placed to possess an overview of the current state of affairs...

'The newspaper headlines tell us that Britain’s wildlife is in trouble. It’s not just rare creatures that are vanishing, hares and hedgehogs, skylarks and water voles, even the humble house sparrow, are in freefall. But there is also good news. Otters have returned to the River Tyne; there are now beavers on the River Otter; and peregrines have taken up residence in the heart of London. Stephen Moss travels the length and breadth of the UK, from the remote archipelago of St Kilda to our inner cities, to witness at first-hand how our wild creatures are faring and ask how we can bring back Britain’s wildlife.'

And the state of affairs can be alarming if stats were all we had to work with...

99% of hay meadows lost in our lifetime

Likewise 96% of chalk and limestone grasslands

500,000 farm ponds...

300,000 miles of hedgerows....

Blame World War Two for some of this...

'For the countryside - and in particular the lowland countryside of southern and eastern England - the resulting transformation was sudden and extreme. Precious, complex habitats, which had evolved over hundreds, sometimes thousands of years, were simply destroyed.'

Dig For Victory kept the nation fed but recovery after the war of what had been lost was nigh on impossible. For wildlife ' the changes were, quite simply, a disaster' but a near bankrupt nation still had to feed itself and sadly that intensive farming soon segued into the widespread use of insecticides, an even louder death knell for species already under threat. It's a sobering thought that for the generation of today the countryside has always looked like this...

'But those who can still recall the years between the wars know that our rural landscape was very different then : richer, more varied, and above all filled with a far greater variety of plants and insects, mammals and birds. This is not mere rose-tinted nostalgia - but a glimpse of the reality of what modern industrial farming has done to our countryside.'

If there is one aspect of reading this short list that I have enjoyed it is the way the books arc across each other and touch on similar themes before exploring them from a different perspective. Read The Wild Kingdom in tandem with The Running Hare by John Lewis-Stempel and prepare to emerge informed and ready to gird up thy warrior loins.

'How have we managed to preside over such a cataclysmic decline in our farm wildlife, a decline that may not be reversible?' asks Stephen Moss...well brace for some revealing and worthwhile reading.

Each chapter, ranging through farmland and grassland, woods and forests, mountains and moorlands, rivers and streams, coast and sea, towns, cities and gardens and through to the edgelands, the 'accidental countryside, spells out the perils facing our wildlife. I have emerged with a plethora of fascinating Did-You-Know that I didn't know before. I'll treat you to some of the random observations that Bookhound has been treated to of late...

There are only 5000 nesting pairs of Nightingales remaining in Britain...

Grey squirrels were introduced in 1876 and haven't left since...

The hedgehog population is down by 97%..

As a nation we spend £150 million on wild bird food

Capercaillie are on the brink of extinction yet again...40 years ago there were 20,000, now there are about 1200. (No, don't worry, I didn't really know what a capercaillie looked like either.)

That is partly because there are too many red and roe deer (750,000 of them) who remove the ground cover...

But deer stalking generates £70 million revenue each year...

Can you see the dilemma here...it's a massive wildlife Catch 22 situation. Solving one environmental problem all too often creates another. Put up a fence to restrict the deer's access to capercaillie ground cover and the birds fly into them and die.

It's not all doom and gloom though, and along the way Stephen Moss weaves in the success stories to be cheerful about...think otters, think peregrine falcons. But the balance is precarious. To be honest I've always thought it a minor miracle that salmon survive at all, let alone find their way back to their spawning beds, whilst that other beloved sight on the river bank, the kingfisher can be all but wiped out by a harsh winter.

Stephen Moss doesn't shy away from controversial topics either, culling for one, the re-introduction of predatory species for another, with the arguments for and against often emanating from the sides you might least expect. He has some interesting thoughts about nature reserves too and theories about conservation arguing that we got conservation policy wrong...

'In a last ditch effort to save what we had left, we focused not on the commonplace, but on the rare...so while we were making sure that avocets and ospreys were safe, the rest of our countryside was being trashed in the name of short-term profit...'

Wild Kingdom is Stephen Moss's valiant and important reveille to the rest of us. It has been time well-spent reading this book and I for one have heard the message clearly.

Comments

Wild Kingdom - Bringing Back Britain's Wildlife ~ Stephen Moss

Time is galloping on because this Thursday sees the announcement of the winner of the 2017 Wainwright Prize. Just to recap this is a prize of £5000 awarded to the author of the book that, in the judges' opinion,best reflects Wainwright’s core values of Great British writing & culture and a celebration of the outdoors.

And for those who might be asking 'Who on earth is Wainwright?'

'Born in Blackburn in 1907, Alfred Wainwright left school at the age of 13. A holiday at the age of 23 kindled a life-long love affair with the Lake District. Following a move to Kendal in 1941 he began to devote every spare moment he had to researching and compiling the original seven Pictorial Guides. He described these as his ‘love letters’ to the Lakeland Fells.'

If I was a Lake District walker (which I haven't been yet) I would have all of these on my shelf and would use them constantly. As it is I walk out on Dartmoor every week and bemoan the fact that Dartmoor really has no latter-day pocket-sized, rainproof equivalent. William Crossing did a thorough job in the early twentieth century, and Eric Hemery an even more thorough job in the 1980s, and though both books are fascinating for their detail and description they lack Wainwright's detailed drawings, and neither book is portable.

Criteria for the Wainwright Prize suggest that the book should be narrative driven with a subject that must be related to nature, the outdoors or travel writing (not guidebooks) covering Great Britain and Wild Kingdom - Bringing Back Britain's Wildlife by Stephen Moss (with another fine Carry Ackroyd jacket design) fits the bill well. As a TV producer (most notably in the BBC Natural History department and bringing us Springwatch) he is well-placed to possess an overview of the current state of affairs...

'The newspaper headlines tell us that Britain’s wildlife is in trouble. It’s not just rare creatures that are vanishing, hares and hedgehogs, skylarks and water voles, even the humble house sparrow, are in freefall. But there is also good news. Otters have returned to the River Tyne; there are now beavers on the River Otter; and peregrines have taken up residence in the heart of London. Stephen Moss travels the length and breadth of the UK, from the remote archipelago of St Kilda to our inner cities, to witness at first-hand how our wild creatures are faring and ask how we can bring back Britain’s wildlife.'

And the state of affairs can be alarming if stats were all we had to work with...

99% of hay meadows lost in our lifetime

Likewise 96% of chalk and limestone grasslands

500,000 farm ponds...

300,000 miles of hedgerows....

Blame World War Two for some of this...

'For the countryside - and in particular the lowland countryside of southern and eastern England - the resulting transformation was sudden and extreme. Precious, complex habitats, which had evolved over hundreds, sometimes thousands of years, were simply destroyed.'

Dig For Victory kept the nation fed but recovery after the war of what had been lost was nigh on impossible. For wildlife ' the changes were, quite simply, a disaster' but a near bankrupt nation still had to feed itself and sadly that intensive farming soon segued into the widespread use of insecticides, an even louder death knell for species already under threat. It's a sobering thought that for the generation of today the countryside has always looked like this...

'But those who can still recall the years between the wars know that our rural landscape was very different then : richer, more varied, and above all filled with a far greater variety of plants and insects, mammals and birds. This is not mere rose-tinted nostalgia - but a glimpse of the reality of what modern industrial farming has done to our countryside.'

If there is one aspect of reading this short list that I have enjoyed it is the way the books arc across each other and touch on similar themes before exploring them from a different perspective. Read The Wild Kingdom in tandem with The Running Hare by John Lewis-Stempel and prepare to emerge informed and ready to gird up thy warrior loins.

'How have we managed to preside over such a cataclysmic decline in our farm wildlife, a decline that may not be reversible?' asks Stephen Moss...well brace for some revealing and worthwhile reading.

Each chapter, ranging through farmland and grassland, woods and forests, mountains and moorlands, rivers and streams, coast and sea, towns, cities and gardens and through to the edgelands, the 'accidental countryside, spells out the perils facing our wildlife. I have emerged with a plethora of fascinating Did-You-Know that I didn't know before. I'll treat you to some of the random observations that Bookhound has been treated to of late...

There are only 5000 nesting pairs of Nightingales remaining in Britain...

Grey squirrels were introduced in 1876 and haven't left since...

The hedgehog population is down by 97%..

As a nation we spend £150 million on wild bird food

Capercaillie are on the brink of extinction yet again...40 years ago there were 20,000, now there are about 1200. (No, don't worry, I didn't really know what a capercaillie looked like either.)

That is partly because there are too many red and roe deer (750,000 of them) who remove the ground cover...

But deer stalking generates £70 million revenue each year...

Can you see the dilemma here...it's a massive wildlife Catch 22 situation. Solving one environmental problem all too often creates another. Put up a fence to restrict the deer's access to capercaillie ground cover and the birds fly into them and die.

It's not all doom and gloom though, and along the way Stephen Moss weaves in the success stories to be cheerful about...think otters, think peregrine falcons. But the balance is precarious. To be honest I've always thought it a minor miracle that salmon survive at all, let alone find their way back to their spawning beds, whilst that other beloved sight on the river bank, the kingfisher can be all but wiped out by a harsh winter.

Stephen Moss doesn't shy away from controversial topics either, culling for one, the re-introduction of predatory species for another, with the arguments for and against often emanating from the sides you might least expect. He has some interesting thoughts about nature reserves too and theories about conservation arguing that we got conservation policy wrong...

'In a last ditch effort to save what we had left, we focused not on the commonplace, but on the rare...so while we were making sure that avocets and ospreys were safe, the rest of our countryside was being trashed in the name of short-term profit...'

Wild Kingdom is Stephen Moss's valiant and important reveille to the rest of us. It has been time well-spent reading this book and I for one have heard the message clearly.

Constants...

Team Tolstoy

Team TolstoyA year-long shared read of War & Peace through the centenary year of Count Lyev Nikolayevich Tolstoy's death, starting on his birthday, September 9th 2010.
Everyone is welcome to board the troika and read along, meeting here on the 9th of every month to chat in comments about the book.

Team Tolstoy BookmarkDon't know your Bolkonskys from your Rostovs?
An aide memoire that can be niftily printed and laminated into a double-sided bookmark.

Port Eliot Festival

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